J.J. Abrams often gets mocked for how much lens flare he put into Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness. But while comments about the lens flares in his reboot movie didn’t make him stop using them in the recent sequel, he says that he was actually being more conscious of how they affected the film. In fact, he claims that he actually reduced the lens flare!

“I know I get a lot of grief for that. But I’ll tell you, there are times when I’m working on a shot, I think, ‘Oh this would be really cool… with a lens flare,'” Abrams says, summing up his thought process for how to make every single shot cooler with more lens flare. “But I know it’s too much, and I apologize. I’m so aware of it now. I was showing my wife an early cut of Star Trek Into Darkness and there was this one scene where she was literally like, ‘I just can’t see what’s going on. I don’t understand what that is.’ I was like,’‘Yeah, I went too nuts on this.'” I’d like to imagine that his wife made him sleep on the couch that night as punishment.

The lens flare got so out of control that Abrams needed it fixed in post-production. “This is how stupid it was. I actually had to use ILM [Industrial Light & Magic] to remove lens flare in a couple of shots, which is, I know, moronic. But I think admitting you’re an addict is the first step towards recovery.” Well put, J.J. Most of the lens flares in both movies don’t bother me that much, but there are certainly some shots where you have to wonder why you’re just staring into the sun.